Printers in Tehran

Recently seen on Slashdot: this surprisingly lengthy piece in the Boston Globe on the possibly illegal sale of HP printers in Iran. Let’s leave aside for a moment debates around the effectiveness of sanctions and embargoes. Isn’t a desktop printer (or cell phone, or Xerox copier, or…) exactly the kind of thing Western countries should want sold on the streets of Tehran? The regime is jailing bloggers and defining “defamation” over SMS as a new computer crime, and an undiscriminating embargo abets this by limiting the introduction of technologies that promote freedom of communication.